Reminder: Bjarne Stroustrup live tomorrow in Austin, TX

C++11 Style: A Touch of Class (Bjarne Stroustrup)

September 19, Austin, TX, USA

What principles, techniques, and idioms can we exploit to make it easier to produce quality code? This presentation reflects my thoughts on what “Modern C++” should mean in the 2010s: a language for programming based on light-weight abstraction with a direct and efficient mapping to hardware, suitable for infrastructure code. I will make an argument for type-rich interfaces, compact data structures, integrated resource management and error handling, and highly-structured algorithmic code. I will illustrate my ideas and motivate my guidelines with a few idiomatic code examples. I will use C++11 freely. Examples include auto, general constant expressions, uniform initialization, type aliases, type safe threading, and user-defined literals. C++ features are only just starting to appear in production compilers, so some of my suggestions have the nature of conjecture. However, developing a “modern style” is essential if we don’t want to maintain newly-written 1970s and 1980s style code in 2020.